Write your own bible

How the engine reads your document

It does two things, and understanding them is the whole game:

• It keeps what you state. Every fact you write down becomes locked canon the novel obeys. We transcribe — we don't "improve" your details or quietly change them.
• It invents what you leave out. Anything you don't say, the engine fills with its own generic default. A blank isn't neutral — it's a decision handed to the machine.

Two habits follow from this:

1. State facts; don't tell it as a story. This is a reference document, not a scene. "Dov is terrified of open water after his brother drowned" — not "Dov stared at the waves, remembering." Save the storytelling for your chapter beats; here, just lay out what's true.
2. Name everyone and everywhere — even once. If a person or place has a name, we give it a full entry. A character you mention a single time is still your character; leave them un-named and the engine reinvents them from scratch every time they reappear, and they drift. Naming is cheap; drift is expensive.

What to cover

Sections and headings help us (and you) — "Characters", "The World", "How Magic Works", "History" — but they aren't required. Write in whatever order suits you.

The basics, up front

Before the cast and the world, state the handful of facts that define the book itself. They're small, but the engine needs them — and they're the easiest things to forget, because they feel too obvious to write down:

• Title — what the book (or series) is called. A working title is fine.
• Genre — a standard label (Urban Fantasy, Space Opera, Romantic Suspense, Cozy Mystery). This steers vocabulary and tone.
• Tense — past ("she walked") or present ("she walks").
• Point of view — first person ("I…"), third-person limited (one character's head at a time), or omniscient. If it's multi-POV, say so.
• POV characters — whose eyes do we see through? Name them. This is one of the most important facts in the whole bible: it sets whose head each chapter lives in, and — because a character can only know what they've learned — it governs what the reader is allowed to find out, and when. A story "following Mara, and in the back half also Dov" is a different book from one told only through Mara.
• Logline — one sentence for the core conflict. It orients everything else.
• Tone & themes — a couple of sentences on the emotional experience: the mood, the central tension, what a reader comes to this book for.
• Touchstones — a handful of genre tropes the book runs on ("Found Family", "Enemies to Lovers"), so the engine knows the register.
• Red lines — anything the engine must never do ("no modern slang", "never kill an animal on-page", "no fourth-wall breaks"). Blunt is good.

People

For each named character, the facts worth stating:

• Who they are — role in the story, personality, what they want and why, what's in their way.
• What they look like — the features that matter. Scars, wounds, tattoos, missing limbs: say which side. "A burn scar up her right forearm" pins to the right arm and stays there for the whole book. "She has a scar" drifts.
• What they carry and own — especially a signature possession: the car they always drive, the knife they never put down, the locket from their grandmother. If you name it, we keep it, even in passing.
• What they know as the story opens — the secrets they hold, what they've figured out, what they believe about the others. This decides what they're allowed to act on.
• Their tics — the gesture or phrase they repeat. These make a character feel like one person across a whole book.
• Anything else true about them — a superstition, a fear, a rule they live by, a scrap of history. Just write it. There's no wrong place for a fact in free-form; we find it a home. If you wrote it, we keep it.

Places

Name every place that matters, and say how they fit together: "The Gull's Rest is a tavern in the Harbor District, the roughest quarter of Port Ravensa." That nesting — landmark inside district inside city — is something the engine uses; state it rather than leaving it to guess. A sentence on what a place feels like (what you see, hear, smell arriving) goes a long way.

Relationships

Say how people feel about each other — and note that it runs both ways and isn't symmetric. "Kade trusts Mara completely; Mara finds him useful but wouldn't cross the street for him" is worth far more than "Kade and Mara are partners." Cover the whole cast, not just the hero's relationships.

How the world works

State your rules — magic, technology, the law of the land — and, crucially, who knows each one. "Everyone knows the bridge is cursed after dark" is common knowledge. "Only Sera knows the ward can be broken from inside" is a secret — and if you tell us it's Sera's secret, the engine won't let it leak into anyone else's head. Naming who knows what is how you keep your twists intact.

Where things stand as it opens

A short paragraph on the starting situation: where the main characters are, what's pressing on them, what's about to happen. This is page one's world.

What not to do

• Don't write scenes. Dialogue and blocking belong in the finished novel, not the bible. Here, state the underlying facts.
• Don't assume we'll read between the lines. If a detail matters, write it plainly. We don't infer facts you didn't state — we leave them for the engine to invent, which is the opposite of what you want for anything you care about.
• Don't worry about format or polish. Bullet lists, rough paragraphs, half-sentences — all fine. Completeness beats prettiness.

A quick example

Six sentences, and the engine now has role, arc, personality, a sided scar, a signature vehicle, a signature object, a held secret (locked to Mara alone), and a tic. Everything there is now canon the book will honor. Everything left unsaid — her hair, her apartment, her favorite bar — the engine will invent, and that's fine, because you didn't need to control it.